Cul­tural shock always inter­ests me— assum­ing I’m not the one expe­ri­enc­ing it xD

Expe­ri­enc­ing the dif­fer­ent man­ner­isms of far­away cul­tures can be bewil­der­ing, espe­cially when one has no clue how to inter­pret or respond to what is obvi­ously an extremely seri­ous ges­ture. Ikoku Meiro comes as one of the only anime I’ve seen which shows this in full impact, as Yune’s per­fectly pos­tured Dogeza left Claude com­pletely off bal­ance and, in his case, utterly out­raged. It’s not really sur­pris­ing either— the Dogeza, or any form of pros­tra­tions that’s so deeply set into tra­di­tional Asian man­ner­isms, had always been mis­un­der­stood by west­ern­ers not accom­mo­dated to the culture.

Dogeza [Lit: kneel­ing down on the ground] isn’t a Eng­lish word, and is usu­ally trans­lated as Kow­tow­ing, which comes from the Chi­nese word Ketou [Lit: touch­ing head upon a sur­face]. But one should first note that while the tra­di­tional pur­pose of these two ges­tures are very sim­i­lar, their pro­ce­dure and pos­ture is slightly dif­fer­ent: a proper Dogeza is a deep bow per­formed from the ‘proper posi­tion’ (Seiza), kneel­ing on the ground with both legs folded under­neath. Mean­while, Kow­tow­ing does not require this, and allows the legs to be left in an acute or even right angles; thus it can be done directly from a stand­ing posi­tion with­out com­ing to a kneel­ing sit first. The fore­head is usu­ally left just mil­lime­ters from the ground, although empha­sis can be given by actu­ally touch­ing the ground (audi­bly so for ketou: ouch). The Dogeza’s strict pos­ture has more for­mal­ity, but car­ries essen­tially the same mean­ing: to either show deep respect and rev­er­ence, or to express absolute humil­ity when apol­o­giz­ing or begging.

Notice Yune’s per­fect Dogeza pos­ture vs Yukiatsu’s (AnoHana) far more generic ‘kow­tow’ — his head isn’t low enough.

Dogeza cer­tainly isn’t a slavery-ish man­ner­ism, although it does his­tor­i­cally carry the notion of being in a lower, if not ser­van­tile, posi­tion— peas­ants to nobles, min­is­ters to emper­ors, but not the other way around (except under extremely grave cir­cum­stances). Claude’s reac­tion cer­tainly could have been far worse: many west­ern­ers who first encoun­tered kow­tow­ing thought they were being wor­shiped, and most con­tinue to see it as a sign of abject sub­mis­sion or grov­el­ling. It’s not entirely untrue, as once in China, kow­tow­ing before the emperor sym­bol­ized sub­mis­sion and fealty, thus becom­ing a sig­nif­i­cant issue in diplo­macy and inter­na­tional cer­e­monies back then.

No… it’s not “con­ve­nient”, it’s to be taken extremely seriously.

How­ever, equat­ing the Dogeza/Kowtow to sub­mis­sion with­out tak­ing cir­cum­stances into account would be a grave mis­take: it is sim­ply meant to show whole­hearted earnesty through the dis­play of humil­ity (pros­tra­tion) and the ges­ture of deep respect (bow­ing). In apol­o­giz­ing and beg­ging, it also equals to an acknowl­edge­ment of shame, in a “I’m very sorry to trou­ble you” way, and its pro­found sig­nif­i­cance and sin­cer­ity would often lead to for­give­ness. But while we often see it in the form of apol­o­giz­ing and beg­ging (such as Kyousuke to the direc­tors in OreImo, or Kou’s many apolo­gies in Arakawa), it is also used in for­mal, cer­e­mo­nial greet­ings between equals or to higher-ups (e.g. a high-level inter­view). The exchange is what really sets the rela­tion­ship— the fact that Claude did now bow in the sligh­est in return could be seen as imply­ing that he con­sid­ers him­self far above Yune in posi­tion… not exactly polite.

So if one is ever on the receiv­ing end of one… don’t just stand there in shock =P

Not that adorable lit­tle Yune minds such small matters~

[Shi­rako mugi]

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 19:34 and is filed under Anime, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.